View icons on IBM Bluemix

Thursday, January 14, 2016 4:04 PM UTC

We recently stumbled upon this: view icons from a view panel on an XPage won't be displayed correctly when the app is running on Bluemix. The image is simply not found as the folder /icons isn't available on the runtime. This is how it will look like:

Not that fancy...

I recently also learned that you can access all the files in the runtime via the CF command line interface. So if you are connected with your API endpoint and logged in your can access your files with the commands

cf files <yourAppName>

cf files <yourAppName>/app/notesdata

The second command shows all the files that are in the data folder of the XSP runtime - quite interesting!

When you go further down the folder stucture you will soon get to the domino folder that you may know from the Domino on-premises version in which the icons are usually stored.

As you can see: no icons folder available.

I also learned that you can upload whatever you want to the runtime using the CF command line. So why not just uploading additional folders and files?

Just create a subfolder structure in the folder your manifest file is in (and usually one NSF file, too) and copy the icons folder and content (the gif images) there, too. You should end up with something like this:

If you now push everything to the runtime with

cf push

you will get back your view icons!

Before you create an SPR - IBM is already aware of this issue. My way is just a workaround until this is fixed.

According to the answer I got on my DW-Question this workaround seems to be the only valid one:

Brian Gleeson answered:

"Those icons are actually iNotes resources on the Domino on-prem server. They aren't included in the XPages runtime for Bluemix as it is an optimised buildpack targeted for XPages applications. So we are not likely to add those icons to the XPages runtime on Bluemix in the future.

But as you've outlined, there is a straightforward workaround to include the icons folder when deploying your application."